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This chapter provides an overview of the contents of this volume. To put the contents in perspective, first the developments related to the concept of sustainable development and sustainable forest management (SFM), institutions, institutional economics, and their importance to SFM are discussed. Next, the relevance of markets and other institutions to sustainable forest management is discussed. Finally, an overview of each chapter included in the five parts of this volume is provided.

Despite optimism in the economics literature in the early 1970s regarding our future ability to design institutions, we have yet to progress to a state where we can contribute much towards the definition of optimal institutions for sustainable forest management in developed and/or developing countries. As we have progressed in our knowledge, the concept of specifying an “optimal institution” seems more, rather than less, elusive. Complexities with respect to defining and describing institutions and preferences of economic agents have left us with little progress on connecting institutions with economic behavior. Further complexities regarding the potential endogeneity of institutions within economic behavior have also proven difficult. All of these intricacies must be pursued in a context where the social objectives associated with sustainable forest management are variable and ambiguous. Connecting institutions to economic behavior in pursuit of social objectives may require further refinements in: our understanding and characterization of institutions; our understanding of non-institutional determinants of behavior (such as socio-economic characteristics of firms and their time and risk preferences); a wider recognition of a potential co-dependence (as opposed to cause and effect relationships) between institutions and economic behavior; more explicit recognition of transactions costs and belief systems; and clearer specifications about what we want sustainable forest management to achieve.

Customary tenure, mingled with state law and occasional private titling, continue predominantly to govern African rural and forest lands. This is in spite of evolutionist theories that predicted its demise and colonial and post-colonial policies that tried actively to accelerate it. The chapter develops an anthropological conceptualization of the institutions of embedded tenure. With examples from Africa and various parts of the world, we highlight the factors that account for the flexibility, adaptability and resilience of this type of system. Embedded tenure has been able to cope with economic stress and hostile policies because of the unique way in which it nests private entitlements into the commons, and both of them into collective property and long-lasting social institutions. Two philosophical principles giving rise to three constitutional rights and four appropriations regimes make up its structure, while dynamic access and transformation rules govern the interlocking and transmutations of appropriation regimes across space and time. This opens three specific paths of agricultural change as well profuse right delegation and land transaction procedures. These have helped the system adapt to changing economic, demographic and social conditions since at least the 19 century. Reductionist economic analyses of non-market systems, including property rights, kinship, common property and non-wage systems, contributed to relegating the most innovative aspects of these systems to the limbo of imperfect markets. More interested in ‘crafted’ institutions, the CPR literature also failed to see or emphasize the theoretical and policy implications of the nesting of appropriation regimes in embedded tenure. Other analyses have tended to overemphasize the controversial role of traditional authority at the expense of a deeper institutional analysis of the embedded system. The chapter highlights the numerous policy mistakes that can derive from these forms of reductionism. We conclude that, to disentangle African forest policies from the social costs and inefficiencies of the past, it is necessary to integrate the complexity and validity of embedded tenure institutions and their demonstrated ability to adapt to legal pluralism and commodity markets.

To study the dynamics of forest regimes, an institutional analysis framework which takes account both of factors internal to the institutions and organizations as well as of the external setting - the social, environmental, economic (including markets) and international factors — is developed. Adaptive efficiency, an efficiency measure different from allocative efficiency, is suggested for institutional changes that are path-dependent rather than just price or market-dependent. The framework is used to analyze the dynamics of Indian forest regimes. The main feature of those dynamics has been incremental path-dependent change, the exception being the sudden shift from the dominance of community regimes in the pre-British period to that of state regimes in the British period. The dominant factors in this pattern of incremental change have varied markedly over time. In pre-colonial India the inertia of the informal institutions played a major role. At the outset of the colonial period, “organisational energy” was directed at the dismantling of the existing institutions. But, later many self-reinforcing mechanisms contributed to path-dependent changes. In post-colonial India, self-reinforcing mechanisms at the level of the Legislative Wing (LW) and “organisational inertia” of the Executive Wing (EW) dominated the process of institutional change for a time. But, later the “organisational energy” of the LW, the external setting, and “organisational surges” of the EW allowed more rapid change. The adaptive efficiency varied — higher in decentralized regimes of pre-British India and recent regimes and lower in the centralized regimes of British India and the first four decades of independent India. Organisational inertia has been one of the main factors impeding institutional changes towards adaptive efficiency. Hence, policy and management prescriptions for sustainable forest management, in these countries, should address institutional and organisational aspects in an integrative manner.

This chapter is focused on the fundamental problems related to determining social choices in the realm of the environment — specifically choices with relevance to the preservation of forest biodiversity. The chapter is divided in three sections. First I will characterize the main features of biodiversity, emphasizing also the ethical implications of the common goods properties involved. This part concludes that the fundamental issue is choosing value-articulating institutions that are consistent with the underlying problem characteristics. The second part of the paper is thus devoted at clarifying the role of the institutional context in the valuation process. The final and main part concerns an evaluation of different value articulating institutions to be used when evaluating biodiversity. Both cost-benefit analysis/contingent valuation and various deliberative institutional structures are discussed. It is concluded that deliberative institutions are the only ones that can offer contexts being consistent with the type of cognitive and normative issues involved. A list of more or less unresolved challenges to the application of these methods, is, however, also emphasized.

Sustainable forest management is one of the most capital-intensive activities imaginable. Governments are unlikely to provide the capital needed to emend landscape degradation. On the other hand, private capital will flow into the sector to fund the necessary solutions, but only if investors are rewarded for the environmental services provided by healthy landscapes. Creating markets in environmental services is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for sustainable forestry.

The origin of today’s global environmental problems is the historic difference in property rights regimes between industrial and developing countries, the North and the South. In industrial countries resources such as forests and oil deposits are often under well defined and enforceable property rights, mostly private property regimes. In developing countries they are generally under ill-defined and weakly enforced property rights, mostly community or state property regimes but de-facto open-access regimes. Ill-defined and weakly enforced property rights lead to the over-extraction of natural resources in the South. They are exported at low prices to the North that over-consumes them. The international market amplifies the tragedy of the commons, leading to inferior solutions for the world economy. In developing countries, the conversion of natural resources regimes from community or state property regimes or common access to private property regimes faces formidable opposition due to international economic interests, or to heavy dependence of local and poor people on these resources. The weakness of property rights in to production, such as timber and oil, could be compensated by assigning well defined and enforceable property rights to products or . The 1997 Kyoto Protocol provides an example as it limits countries’ rights to emit carbon, a by - product of burning fossil fuels, but the atmosphere’s carbon concentration is a public good, which makes trading tricky. Similarly, trading rights to forests’ carbon sequestration services involve public goods. Markets that trade public goods require a measure of equity to ensure efficiency, a requirement different than the markets for private goods

We reflect on the reciprocal relationship between population growth and deforestation. In human history there must have been long intervals when, in contrast to a Malthusian scenario, land clearing was low-cost and led subsequent population growth. Trade and migration have taken the bite out of local land scarcity. We explore in theory and in simulations. An extended Hartwick-Long-Tian model relates deforestation to per capita income and relative prices for land in agriculture and in forestry. We report on land-use change since 1700 with the recent HYDE database.

This chapter reviews the pattern of economic development in forestry t and uses that pattern as a basis for commenting on sustainability. It concludes that sustainability in its narrowest sense, a “permanent forest estate” with unchanging boundaries, is a futile objective. It is more reasonable that we determine what to sustain—critical habitat, characteristics of global climate, perpetual options on the use of forest resources, or whatever—and then consider the feasible means for achieving each objective. Each objective requires its own measure of forest resources, and few of those measures are consistent with the standard measures of national forest inventories that are readily available at present. The chapter concludes by returning to the pattern of economic development in forestry as a means for instructing policy to achieve some of these objectives.

Since Adam Smith economists have recognize that specialization provides the basis for a modern economy since it promotes increased productivity, lower costs and intra regional and international trade. Industrial forestry seems to have recognized this economic reality and in the past fifty years has been moved from obtaining almost all of its industrial wood from the logging natural forests to the production of over one-third of society’s industrial wood production from a trees cropping regime of planting, growing and harvesting intensively managed forests. However, much of the modern environmental movement is opposed to specialization and stresses the concept of individual forest sustainability for a spectrum of outputs, an approach directly the opposite to that of economic specialization. This paper attempts to reconciled these conflicting approaches by recognizing the substantial differences in the outputs mix generated by different forests, referring to the commonly accepted Brundtland Commission definition of a sustainable system and applying this concept to the multiple outputs of the various forest.